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Visible near-diffraction-limited lucky imaging with full-sky laser-assisted adaptive optics

Basden, A.G.

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Authors



Abstract

Both lucky imaging techniques and adaptive optics require natural guide stars, limiting sky-coverage, even when laser guide stars are used. Lucky imaging techniques become less successful on larger telescopes unless adaptive optics is used, as the fraction of images obtained with well-behaved turbulence across the whole telescope pupil becomes vanishingly small. Here, we introduce a technique combining lucky imaging techniques with tomographic laser guide star adaptive optics systems on large telescopes. This technique does not require any natural guide star for the adaptive optics, and hence offers full sky-coverage adaptive optics correction. In addition, we introduce a new method for lucky image selection based on residual wavefront phase measurements from the adaptive optics wavefront sensors. We perform Monte Carlo modelling of this technique, and demonstrate I-band Strehl ratios of up to 35 per cent in 0.7 arcsec mean seeing conditions with 0.5 m deformable mirror pitch and full adaptive optics sky-coverage. We show that this technique is suitable for use with lucky imaging reference stars as faint as magnitude 18, and fainter if more advanced image selection and centring techniques are used.

Citation

Basden, A. (2014). Visible near-diffraction-limited lucky imaging with full-sky laser-assisted adaptive optics. Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 442(2), 1142-1150. https://doi.org/10.1093/mnras/stu941

Journal Article Type Article
Acceptance Date May 7, 2014
Online Publication Date Jun 10, 2014
Publication Date Aug 1, 2014
Deposit Date Oct 22, 2014
Publicly Available Date Mar 29, 2024
Journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
Print ISSN 0035-8711
Electronic ISSN 1365-2966
Publisher Royal Astronomical Society
Peer Reviewed Peer Reviewed
Volume 442
Issue 2
Pages 1142-1150
DOI https://doi.org/10.1093/mnras/stu941
Keywords Iinstrumentation: adaptive optics, Instrumentation: high angular resolution, Methods: numerical, Techniques: image processing.

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Copyright Statement
This article has been accepted for publication in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society © 2014 The Author Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Royal Astronomical Society. All rights reserved.





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